50 States of Song 2017
50 States of Song 2017 was the 2nd edition of the 50 States of Song music contest, held between February and June 2017. The contest was directed by gplehner and features song entries from all 50 states and one US territory (Puerto Rico). Rules The rules for the 50 States of Song are loosely based around the Eurovision Song Contest, with some minor differences: *The song must be under 3 minutes and 30 seconds. *The song must be an original composition. No covers! *The artist or band must live in or be from the U.S. state they represent. *The artist or band must not have had a Top 40 hit on several of the Billboard charts at any time prior to the contest. This guarantees up-and-coming artists only. *The artist must be 14 years or older as of the year of their song's release. *Artists who placed in the Top 10 of the previous edition are not allowed to re-enter for one year. *The song should be accompanied by a music video. *In this contest's edition, songs must have been publicly released between January and December 2016. Venue The song contest is held online. The semifinals were posted in early March 2017, and voting was held through April 30 at fiftystatesofsong.com, with cross-promotion on Twitter, Facebook, and the OVSC / PopJustice forum pages. The venue of the Final is TBD 2017 around the Phoenix area. Semifinals Qualification for the finals saw the fifty-one entries broken into two groups, ordered randomly. This was different from 2016, where there was five groups of 10 songs each. Also different was that the winning state's song (Arizona) automatically qualified to the Final Round. Voting was on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 points given to the user's favorite song, and progressing down 9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 points for their ten favorite songs out of 25. Users were allowed to vote for either semifinal but were limited to one vote. Due to "fan voting" in 2016 which resulted in lopsided voting patterns (choosing one song to give 10 points, and disregarding the other nine songs in the list by giving their points in some kind of order), any ballots considered "fan ballots" were grouped into one set of "fan votes" which were added at the end of the voting process. In doing this, no ballots would be thrown out, but uncharacteristic or thoughtless voting styles would devalue the voter's ballot. For 2017, this was only problematic with the results of Semifinal 1. Results Below are the results of the two semifinals. Users could vote one time each for each group of songs; they did not have to vote for both semifinals. Therefore, Semifinal 1 had more points overall than others. Points were allotted as follows: the voter's favorite song 10 points, 2nd favorite = 9, 3rd favorite = 8, etc. all the way down to their tenth-favorite, which would score 1 points, and the remaining 15 songs received 0 points from that ballot. Advancement to the Final Round was determined by the Top 12 songs that received the most points in their semifinal. Semifinal 1 *If the host (me) had not voted, Connecticut would have tied with Oklahoma. Because of this, I decided to give Oklahoma the pass since it had more fan support. Semifinal 2 * Because Alaska received more sets of votes (3) than Illinois (2), the song won the tiebreaker and proceeded to the Final Round. * Initially, Illinois was announced as one of the finalists. After recounting the votes, it was discovered that there was a large error, and both Ohio and Washington had missed receiving points. The video was edited and reposted hours later with the correct results. Finals The 2017 Final Round voting period was held from April 18 through May 29, 2017. Voters had approximately one month to analyze the final 25 songs, which were ordered randomly, and to submit their ballot via a custom survey. Voting was on a 1 to 10 scale, with 10 points given to the user's favorite song, all the way down to 1 point for the 10th-most favorite song. Unlike in 2016, points were not converted into the Eurovision standard 0-12 point scale, so as to eliminate confusion. This resulted in three less points given out per set of votes, and due to the increase in the number of entries, the 2017 highest score was much lower than in 2016. Invalid votes were still an issue, leading to a post-analysis of ballot strategy for the 2018 contest. 50 States of Song will likely return to a smaller grouping format to make dissecting the songs an easier process for casual voters. Video Final Results Twenty-five US states participated in the final. 41 ballots were recorded, 12 of which were used to determine the final winner. The remaining 29 ballots were disqualified due to incomplete voting. The highlighted US state was the winner of the final. Scavenger Hunt of California won with the song "Never Enough," which also captured the semifinal crown. They finished one point ahead of New York's Tor Miller, who received one too few points in the final vote announcement to tie or outright win the contest. Tabular Results Tabular votes (a grid of all received votes) will be released in the upcoming weeks. Category:50 States of Song